Clean (2004)
The initial suspense of Clean lies not in whether its protagonist, Emily (Maggie Cheung), a once promising rock something or another, will shake the grips of heroin addiction, but in the genre itself. One can’t help but wonder whether the picture will compromise its lean integrity and become another grim, purposeless, self-congratulatory slog like nearly every other picture that concerns drug addicts and the (on again off again) struggle they normally face trying to achieve the titular state. Clean is, remarkably though, the ideal title for Olivier Assayas’ picture, referring not only to Emily but to the filmmaker’s astoundingly matter of fact approach. Assayas stands outside and inside the junkie rehab genre at once, examining it like one might a caged bear, with both curiosity and a welcome generosity of spirit. Assayas would appear to view this genre as a puzzle: how do we find the actual humanity of a tragedy or hardship that countless folks face everyday? How do we clear the hurdle of cliché?
The solution is to snip the clichés out like dead branches; quickly, fearlessly, with no apology or self-consciousness. Clean is pointedly devoid of all the scenes one expects from the genre, devoid, in fact, of many of the scenes one expects from any drama. We’re spared tearful reunions or separations, we’re largely spared Emily’s physical torment, we’re spared the death of a pivotal character, an even more pivotal reconciliation is implied but never shown, etc.; scenes end mid-tempo, unfulfilled, the plot floating and wandering like the central character. Clean doesn’t assume the position of a removed, drunken third party telling someone a story at a bar, desperate to move or impress; the picture is Emily: playing its emotions close to its vest, shuffling from one day to the next with completion and maintenance of a basic pride being the hopeful, up-front goals.
Assayas boils everything down to the existential essential without compromising the gravity or pathos of the subject matter in the service of some art-house wank; he earns our trust, and this trust allows the moments to have an anxiety that isn’t real but relatable, the picture is both more universal and more specific at once. Clean manages to be both the most aesthetically beautiful junkie picture I’ve ever seen as well as possibly the most moving without that being a contradiction in terms. Make no mistake, Clean is a movie first and most, still about real problems in a way that only movies are, especially European movies, but the picture is a sublime balancing act, the best of every world.
Maggie Cheung, captivating in a number of Wong-Kar Wai pictures, is startling here as Emily, consciously playing her beauty and poise, normally the bridges that keep us from buying an actor in such a role (ask Charlize Theron or Halle Berry), against our expectations here. Her Emily is vibrant, stunning, self-absorbed, a creature of infinite shells of bullshit who may or may not have an actual, vested interest in finding her humanity. Emily eludes in her apparent lack of elusion, her “straight forwardness” just another device for self-explanation and rationalization, whether she consciously knows it or not. Emily, in an astute observation of behavior on the part of the film, never lies, but pay attention to how she never lies.
Nick Nolte, as Emily’s father-in-law and de facto guardian of her child, etches one of those subtle, volcanic portraits of normalcy and dignity on the brink of falling into the abyss that only a famous weirdo can with such committed lack of irony; the husk of that unmistakable voice, the creases and wrinkles in that deep, large head, the faded lion’s mane of hair, are all used to unforgettable effect; the machismo of Nolte’s past parts inform the role and lend it originality and texture, this is clearly a man used to victory and control learning how to face loss on the fly: he’s, and the film never does our work for us, much more like Emily than either he or Emily know. The picture takes a cue from these rich performances and never stokes the fires of melodrama, these characters never oppose one another as many other films have conditioned us to expect, they instead oppose themselves in front of one another, and discover a common bind that goes on to color the picture’s earned, open-ended final image.
Clean is an accomplishment, a mood film that’s deeper and more moving the further it slips into your memory, perhaps because it manages, so gracefully, to feel half-remembered already.
★★★★
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004)
There are always people you wonder about. People who take out the trash at the high school. People who work the nine to five shifts at the diners and gas stations. People who, in other words, live lives that aren’t routinely glamorized by Hollywood films. Someone once told me that there’s nothing more poignant than the sight of someone eating alone. I’m not sure if I agree, but it would certainly rate high on that meter of things that can casually break your heart. It is particularly poignant to see someone eating alone while obviously on a meal break in the middle of a shift of a thankless job that I’ve just described. What do these people do for happiness? What is their source of hope?
Henry Darger was one such person. A reclusive, fearful mouse of a man, Darger worked a variety of janitorial jobs until he was forced to retire at the age of 73. Several years later he died. His neighbors, who helped him get along financially from time to time, opened his small apartment-and discovered thousands of pages of writing. A few hundred of them are a sort of autobiography; several thousand more are an epic, epic, epic fantasy novel: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger is filmmaker Jessica Yu’s exploration of this man. Yu’s technique is admirably, deceptively simple: she tells Darger’s story through the art itself, as that was the only thing Darger left behind. Portions of the novel are memorably dramatized and large patches of Darger’s extensive illustrations are allowed to breath and move and inhabit the world that seemed to so consume this man. The autobiography is recruited to serve as substitute narration, an act of acknowledgment that Darger was determined to avoid while living.
Darger’s work is inspired and disturbing, revealing a lonely, paranoid, probably obsessive compulsive personality; a man who grew up bad and incapable of forming significant human contact. Darger, like many a writer, invented a new world as substitute for understanding the old one. Darger personifies the idea of the artist that we tend to glorify without thought: the man who has to create to live. In the Realms of the Unreal acknowledges the lunacy that resides on just the other side of the artistic coin.
These are the sorts of documentaries that appeal to me, these fringe stories of existence that point toward a larger acknowledgement of how befuddling life in general can be (another recent example being Crazy Love.) Yu’s film is beautiful and well-crafted; respectful of Darger but not overly sentimental as to his problematic nature. One thing did trouble me while watching: Darger’s work, and pre-occupation with little girls, seemed to me to be highly suggestive of pedophilic desires. Watch Darger’s desperation over finding a photo of a murdered girl that haunts his novel. Watch the frequent scenes of torture and violence that pop up in his book. Yu barely addresses this particular issue; she favors the “lonely old man” angle. Lonely old man, sadly, is the best that Darger could hope for.
★★★½
Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)
Infection opens with several vignettes that gradually reveal to us the various nurses, doctors, and patients that populate a barren hospital one night. The stafff is overworked, underfunded and in danger of mental collapse. The patients, those that aren’t rotting away from burns or a very mysterious disease, are probably clinically insane, or don’t exist to begin with. The entire thing is absurd, particularly the design of the hospital from Hell, but then so are most nightmares, and for awhile director Masayuki Ochiai plays phenomenally on all the little things that nag you while you sit in a hospital waiting room. What if they re-used diseased syringes? What if something really deadly is incubating in the person who sits next to you? What if the doctor is crazy?
Infection appears to be one of those “people get picked off one by one by a mysterious thing that may or may not mutate them” kind of movies. I was thinking John Carpenter’s The Thing or Leviathan. Ochiai does incorporate some of those conventions, but there is also an emphasis placed, particularly in the third act, on something less tangible. Reality begins to crumble for these characters, and we wonder whether the disease is of the tell-tale variety, some sort of mass guilt that plagues the staff over a cover up that happens earlier in the film. The doctors turn on each other, try to figure out the source of the disease and…
…that’s right around when the film totally shoves its head up its own ass. Imagine the end of The Sixth Sense, only instead of Bruce Willis being the ghost, it turns out that yes, he’s the ghost, then, no, he’s not a ghost, then, well, yes, he may be a ghost, but then, no Haley Joel Osment is the ghost and he’s imagining that Bruce Willis is a ghost to deal with his own fear of being a ghost. What I just wrote is much more coherent than the last twenty minutes or so of Infection, which turns into an inescapable house of mirrors for its characters. By the end, convolution has become the disease and, believe me, Ochiai isn’t offering a cure.
It works though, and I normally don’t go for the Japansese horror films that get shipped to the U.S and are, inevitably, remade as more sensical but even more boring American films for teens. Infection maintains interest even in its knottier sections because it’s grounded in a very true, tangible anxiety of a total loss of control, of a fear that people who should know what they’re doing don’t.
Review: Incident at Loch Ness (2004)
He’s made a number of movies that are justly celebrated for either their brilliance, originality, adventurousness or a little of all, but Werner Herzog is probably most loved because he has the personality and spontaneity to do things like pop up in Zak Penn’s comic mockumentary (comockumentary?)
Incident at Loch Ness. How many great so and sos would do that? (The legend letting their hair down in something unexpected award still goes to Kurt Vonnegut’s cameo in
Back to School though.) Of all the great filmmakers, Herzog may be one of two (David Lynch being the other) who’s least concerned with how they’re received by the critics, and that’s always welcome in this art form.
Zak Penn is primarily known as a screenwriter, particularly in the action or superhero arena (X2, Behind Enemy Lines, the forthcoming The Incredible Hulk), but his sensibilty here as co-writer (with Herzog) and director is dry, dry, dry and I say more power to him. The first half of Loch Ness, which concerns Penn and Herzog’s efforts to film a documentary about the elusive creature, could be mistaken as a making of supplement to a real movie. Penn and Herzog don’t tip their hats like Christopher Guest, they sell you on the mundane reality of the situation, and score sly points on the ego of filmmaking.
“Score sly points on the ego of filmmaking”, yeah, its been done, but the performances (mostly people playing themselves) are dead on, and the novelty of seeing a great like Herzog trump his image for an entire film goes a long way. Loch Ness does lose its footing about half way through, turning into an uneven comic riff on The Jaws Witch Project, but all Herzog nuts should see it. Which means all film nuts should see it.
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